Bacchus, Ceres and Amor

A line from the Roman playwright Terence sits behind this picture. Without Ceres and Bacchus, Venus grows cold, which is to say that love does not survive without bread and wine. Hans von Aachen gives the goddess of the harvest and the god of wine the leading roles, with the boy Cupid between them, and the Kunsthistorisches Museum notes that he took the faces from his own household. The two gods carry his features and his wife's, and the boy looks like his son. Von Aachen had married Regina di Lasso, daughter of the composer Orlande de Lassus, in Munich in 1596. The boy with grapes may also be a painter's joke. The ancient Greek artist Zeuxis was said to have painted a boy holding grapes so convincingly that birds flew down to peck at the fruit. Von Aachen put his monogram, HVA, high on the pillar at the right, and the canvas is recorded in Prague in 1621.